Continuously Improving Innovation Management through Enterprise Social Media

Abstract

This multi-year case study describes how our organization employed enterprise social media technology to change how we elicit, manage, and evaluate the large number of proposals submitted to our in-house research and development program and how we have continued to adopt and modify a single innovation management platform to address the strategic business needs of the corporation. We redesigned the proposal competition process using a commercially available innovation management platform as a mechanism to encourage posting research ideas, commenting on them, and finding researchers with similar or complementary ideas. As measured by a survey administered in two successive years, once when we were using older technology and again after the enterprise innovation management platform was introduced, participants’ satisfaction level increased significantly under the new process. This article also provides and discusses participation data over a three-year period. With an increasing business need to reach out to broader audiences beyond the researcher participants, we added a precursor event to proposal solicitation and selection that enables consumers of the research to help shape the research program strategy and outcomes. This extension to the process using prediction markets garnered an encouraging level of participation in its first deployment. Besides describing the steps we took to adapt the technology and design and evaluate the new process, this paper offers observations for other organizations considering using enterprise innovation management software to continuously improve their ideation processes and broaden engagement across the organization.